The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive is pleased to announce that the School has been awarded $223,312 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to process, preserve, digitize, and provide web-based access to its Exhibitions Collection. For over five decades, the School’s exhibitions have bridged pedagogy and public service by enriching The Cooper Union’s curriculum and serving New York City’s local and regional design community.

The School’s exhibition program is extensive and diverse, featuring the work of celebrated and emerging architects, designers, photographers, painters, builders, and sculptors, as well as faculty and students. It includes major exhibitions, typically held twice a year either in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery or 41 Cooper Gallery. The School’s Third Floor Hallway Gallery hosts shorter, rotating shows focusing on work by new faculty, invited guests, and students, as well as material from the Archive’s collections. Several past exhibitions have addressed the school’s curriculum, drawing extensively from the Archive’s core Student Work Collection.

Image Credit: [UN]BUILT, 1960 – 1990 | Raimund Abraham (1991), photograph by Michael Rogol.

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The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that four publications by students and faculty have been added to its extensive catalog of books available for purchase through the Architecture Archive.

As part of an ongoing series, the School’s Thesis book documents the culminating academic work of each undergraduate in the School of Architecture. Produced annually since 2014, the publication is designed and edited by graduating students under the direction of their Thesis faculty and the Architecture Archive. Thesis publications for the classes of 2020 and 2019 are now available (listed here). Produced during the pandemic, both publications document the remarkable Thesis work of each class —collectively and individually— as well as their commitment to continuing the series under challenging circumstances.

Two faculty publications are also available: the Architecture of Nature/Nature of Architecture (ORO, 2018; listed here), by Professor Diana Agrest, which explores the natural forces at play in the history of the earth through drawings and models from the School’s Advanced Research Graduate Design Studio that Agrest created and directs; and Inside-Out: Architecture New York City (Charta, 2006; listed here), a monograph from the esteemed architect and Cooper Union professor Diane Lewis (1951-2017). Documenting Lewis’s work from the early 1980s through 2005, Inside-Out includes projects from art galleries and the New York Kunsthalle to film studios, theaters, museums, and residences.

The School of Architecture is pleased to share Other Ways of Living Together, a housing study by NADAAA, as part of an ongoing series highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with How Will We Live Together, the Venice Biennale’s 17th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis. 

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share Geoscope 2: Worlds, a project by Jesse Reiser (AR’81) and Nanako Umemoto (AR’83) of RUR Architecture.

01Geoscope 2: Worlds is a split-sphere, multimedia installation showcasing over a dozen (and counting) contemporary voices inside and outside architecture, from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to radical ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton. Visitors to the installation find themselves enveloped in a pneumatic, panoramic environment where projections on 42 individual facets generate a complex, kaleidoscopic ecosystem—a tableaux of world-thinking on the edge. Inspired by Daniel López-Pérez’s provocative and luminous book R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), Reiser, Umemoto, and their team were challenged with displaying the breadth and quality of its content for an exhibition at Princeton University in February 2020. The result was the first iteration of Geoscope 2, a continuation of Fuller’s original geoscopes reimagined through contemporary means. The project’s second iteration is now on view at the 2021 Venice Biennale.

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share The Zayandeh-rud River Basin, a project by Dean Tehrani’s office NADAAA.

This project is NADAAA’s contribution to Future Assembly—a curatorial initiative developed in response to Hashim Sarkis’s invitation, as the curator of the Biennale, “to imagine a design inspired by the United Nations—the current paradigm for a multilateral assembly.” Future Assembly invited all Biennale participants, more than 50 of whom participated, to address the following prompt: 

In what will be remembered as a year entirely incarcerated by the two-dimensional space of the screen, these monitors bring to life the personal tablets of each student, now animated for the neighborhood to see, and perchance to critique. If the life of New York City has already changed in the past weeks, with masks off and the hustle of the city back in stride, we have also reckoned with the fact that many are still stuck in other countries, time zones, and far-off lands. Thus, online we get to peer into these speculations as a parallel world. And a world it has been! The charged themes that have given rise to the urgencies of this past year --some timely, though mostly belated-- have found their way into the dialogue of our studios, seminars, and thesis projects. The delayed Venice Biennale asks us “How Will We All Live Together?” The injustices that surround the murder of George Floyd and the many others that succumbed to his fate, the individual isolation experienced globally by everyone on this planet as a result of the pandemic, the climate crisis and the dim possibility of its mitigation as evident in the dormancy of global human activities, the nefarious role of technologies in dictating the truths and fictions of our times --these were just some of the themes probed at all levels in our pedagogies. We worked on schedule, in between schedules, and we worked across multiple time zones. We also worked as individuals and groups. Ultimately, we came out of this together, united in a common project focused on how architecture as a discipline may speak to the world at large, and how its forms, spaces, and materialities implicate the charged debates of our time. We have learned much this year, and some of it might yet stay with us. The End of Year Show and its companion website are a document of this time, and perchance the blueprint of those lessons.

The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that this year’s 17th International Architecture Exhibition of the 2021 Venice Biennale, on view through November 21, features work by several of the School’s faculty and alumni. Curated by the architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis, the exhibition invites participants and exhibitors to consider the question: How will we live together? Notes Sarkis, “We need a new spatial contract. In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together.” 

For the next few weeks, the School of Architecture will highlight faculty and alumni projects featured in the Biennale, beginning with Microcosms & Schisms, a project curated by Associate Dean Hayley Eber AR'01 and Architecture faculty Nora Akawi, Lydia Kallipoliti, Lauren Kogod, and Ife Vanable. With generous support from the IDC Foundation, the curators worked closely with faculty member Austin Wade Smith, fabricator Chris Otterbine, and several graduate and undergraduate students to build and install the exhibition. You may access the curatorial statement and overview of the project here. 

Multiple projects with ties to The Cooper Union will be on view in Venice this year, either as official exhibitions of The Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021 or running concurrently to it. Projects by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture faculty include Microcosms & Schisms, a project by Associate Dean Hayley Eber AR'01 and Architecture faculty Nora Akawi, Lydia Kallipoliti, Lauren Kogod, and Ife Vanable exhibiting in the Co-Habitats section of the Biennale. Two projects by Dean Nader Tehrani’s architecture and urban design firm NADAAA, a portico and a house prototype, are also on view. David Gersten AR'91 is a featured exhibitor in the Italian Virtual Pavilion with SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood.

Several of these and Alumni projects will be featured in greater detail in our ARCHLOG in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

The School of Architecture records, archives and publishes videos of public programs to open access and accommodate asynchronous learning and research for audiences in different time zones. You may visit our Vimeo channel for access to all our video content.

If you recently missed a lecture or event you wanted to see, make sure to check out the Fall 2020 and the Spring 2021 Lecture and Events Lists. Links to earlier semester event lists are found at the bottom of their respective event pages.

For campus-wide COVID-19 updates and resources, please visit The Cooper Union's website.